non-returnable

with the proliferation of social media sites and people's penchants for publishing photos of every trivial event in their lives, i live more or less inundated by the imagery of 'happy family units'. all around me are stories and pictures of such happy families - loving parents smiling at the camera holding on to happy little children - gap toothed ... obese... snub nosed .. no matter what just perfect in their eyes. and i think back to my childhood. think back to my experience in a family unit. i am more than convinced that the reason i was ignored the way i was, emotionally abandoned the way i was was because neither of my parents were able to like me. forget love. that's asking too much. who can blame them really? by my teens, i was grossly overweight, dark complexioned, plain looking.... well, just ugly. how could you blame them?
where's it guaranteed that parents will love their children for the sole reason that they are responsible for the gene pool?
i see these photos everyday - children in even worse shape than i was at their age thanks to the excesses of the current lifestyle - and i cannot believe how they take for granted so much love that is showered on them. like a birth right. i hear the pride in those parents' voices. the affection in their eyes. the complete acceptance. i don't know how it happens. it didn't go that way for me. and i don't blame my parents either. it is possible i think to end up with a raw deal in life's random roulette of procreation. what if you just can't love this being that has arrived and cannot be returned? what if the child fails to engender love and affection in you? it's the child's weakness if anything - it's their failure.

birthday boy

for my fifth birthday, my mother had a shirt dress tailor made for me to wear at the party. this dress looked exactly like a shirt a boy would wear, only resplendent with color as was the fashion in the 70s. i remember seeing the dress for the first time right before guests were supposed to be arriving for the party (i was to have a corn on the cob shaped cake for some inexplicable reason). needless to say, i was shell-shocked. i asked them only one question: where are the pants? i was told there wasn't going to be any. i remember first the panic, then the sadness, then the anger and then the sense of being utterly betrayed. i was five. i didn't care what women were wearing in the Sears catalog that year. i wanted to be properly clothed. happy, for a change. because it was my birthday. it was supposed to be my day. and they took that from me. like most other things.
what made it so much worse was that as far back as i can remember i had wanted to be a boy. perhaps quite early on i realized that i had no currency in my family as a girl. they already had one of those and made my redundancy amply clear to me. through verbal cues, disinterest and inattention to anything i said or did. i was almost non-existent, in sight yet out of mind. so i thought if i could be a boy, i might be accepted. fill some void may be. be noticed. perhaps even liked. given my psyche being already damaged, it was absolutely traumatizing for me to have to parade around in what i considered just a shirt with no pants on. i felt mortified. i did not want a party. i did not want to smile for people. i did not want any part in it. not that i had a choice. i wanted to die then. even as i think about it 30 yrs later, i still feel the same. i feel it just as intensely as i did on that day. nothing has changed. time doesn't heal all wounds.